Introducing the .NET Foundation
Microsoft’s evolution towards a major open source player has reached the next step with the introduction of the .NET Foundation. The purpose of the foundation is to “be the steward of a growing collection of open source technologies for.NET”.
The founding members include six from non-Microsoft companies:
- Miguel de Icaza of Xamarin.
- Laurent Bugnion of IdentityMine
- Niels Hartvig of Umbraco
- Nigel Sampson of Compiled Experience
- Anthony von der Hoom of Glimpse
- Paul Betts of GitHub
Currently there are 24 projects in the foundation, mostly donated by Microsoft and Xamarin.
- .NET API for Hadoop WebClient
- .NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn")
- .NET Map Reduce API for Hadoop
- .NET Micro Framework
- ASP.NET MVC
- ASP.NET SignalR
- ASP.NET Web API
- ASP.NET Web Pages
- Composition (MEF2)
- Entity Framework
- Linq to Hive
- MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework)
- OWIN Authentication Middleware
- Rx (Reactive Extensions)
- Web Protection Library
- Windows Azure .NET SDK
- Windows Phone Toolkit
- Xamarin couchbase-lite-net
- Xamarin Mailkit
- Xamarin Mimekit
- Xamarin System.Drawing
While the community reaction has been generally positive, one point of contention is the lack of mention for Silverlight or WPF. With Silverlight on the web being completely depreciated and WPF in maintenance mode, developers were hoping Microsoft would open source the aging bits.